The Thousand Souls
by The Madman From Queens
Summary: "Let the tears which fell... be sacred."


**Major spoilers for LIE. You have been warned.**

Today, evicted from his box of a studio apartment, he is Creon, having the world crumble in on him for just trying to follow the laws and right and wrong. Tomorrow he knows he will rise from the ashes—he already feels them burning his hands—as Apollo, with lyre-calloused fingers. His fingers already have callouses, he smiles, from working his craft, from the dirt of his art. From observing people… From bartending to get the cynicism just right, from living homeless to get the rough edge on his voice and demeanor.

The day after he will be worse off than the day before the day before that, as the other Creon—the one with Medea's poison eating away his skin.

Every day he is a shadow.

Today is the last day he's given himself with them, a formal goodbye, before he rejoins himself. After everything that's happened recently, he knows that it's necessary. Painful, but necessary. So he takes himself to his favorite graveyard back home and exhumes the spirits behind names and epitaphs in characters crafted on the spot. It's his favorite pastime, although he always thought—hoped—that he'd be drawn to something happier.

Grigor stares at a grave that's so worn that the lettering is completely gone, leaving it eerily blank. He hadn't been lying when he said that getting a theater and giving back to those who helped him was his dream. That was his dream, all right, though thankfully the Plutus names were _not_ his angel investors. He had actually convinced itself it was true at the time, just to get the emotion across, so what the Drew girl saw was pretty much what she got. He'd be destroyed.

Now that he's an ex-convict it's about ten thousand times less likely to happen. But he'll find a way. If he was able to get out of north Philadelphia, he'll be able to get inside his own theater. The hard part is already done.

He's keeping the name, but he's got to get rid of the character.

Grigor continues through the graveyard, his feet sinking into the soft ground. He stops in front of another grave and smiles wanly.

Grigor Karakinos.

He still remembers the day Grigor died. At seventeen, he spent more time at the theater than he did at his foster home. He was close to aging out, anyway, and here he always felt the freedom wash down his throat like a cool drink of water to someone who's thirsty. They were all running a dress rehearsal that day for _The Prisoner of Second Avenue_, where the teenager had a silent role as one of Mel's antagonizers. He wore a black windbreaker over a sweater vest and white button up from another rehearsal, his high school production of _Inherit the Wind_. He played the reporter, E. K. Hornbeck. Grigor had complained bitterly when the teen showed up with a tattered jacket and incongruous immaculate hair to match Hornbeck's clothing. From then on, he had gone to school rehearsals with the messy hair of his _Second Avenue_ teen character, arguing that Hornbeck's rebellion more than accounted for what he did and didn't do with his hair. Still, Grigor had been unhappy that he was playing a "young" character who was in his thirties and grumbled darkly about high school theater, but he took on Hornbeck along with all of the other characters in the teenager's head—and Hornbeck was by the far the most developed and the most cancerous. This was why Grigor started him off with smaller, more austere characters and helped him build up to the bigger, richer ones: the smaller ones would get out of his system more quickly. The bigger ones would possess him. He wasn't ready for those. In another gesture to combat Hornbeck, Grigor gave him the black windbreaker to wear for his _Second Avenue_ character, firmly requesting character development on that end. The teen knew that Grigor was pulling him in a direction for this one—the black windbreaker mirrored James Dean's red one in _Rebel Without A Cause_—and he let him do so. He even turned around and made the swap for Hornbeck, playing him more bitter, less snarky, as if he not only knew the world for what it was but cared a little more than he showed. As if he had lived roughly.

But that night, for _Second Avenue_, Grigor never saw the plumage of costumes, many of which he'd provided. That night, the teen thought about not only the clothing he'd been given, but the character. Neil Simon's script didn't call for some punk kid to goad the protagonist. Most of the principal actors would have preferred going without and made no bones about it through their whispers; they were annoyed by that teen who always hung around. But everybody reluctantly agreed with Grigor that his audition was dynamite, only he wasn't quite the age that all of the other characters were. The only way to appease Grigor was to add a silent character.

Grigor kept a very active presence at rehearsals, especially when it got closer to performances. Everybody had waited fifteen minutes for him.

He never showed.

Not after fifteen minutes, not after an hour, not after rehearsal was finished.

Hornbeck became clearer to the teen that night than he or anyone else he'd ever studied ever had. Grigor couldn't catch up with him and mold him back into himself. For the first time, he walked home still in character. And the character didn't stop. When his foster mother came into his room that night without knocking he threw her some snide comment that was Hornbeck's.

And when she told him flatly that that theater creep had died, he wasn't sad or shocked, just thoughtful.

Grigor the younger was twelve when he met his future namesake. He wore the same jacket he had just attempted to steal on stage that night, and Grigor had sent him home with it. After work as an extra, the boy had gone out to the library and got an armful of monologue books. He worked through them all in a static night, fueled by some sort of lightning charged through his veins. When it closed for the night he retreated into the restroom and bounced words off the walls. Each character came so quickly to him that he found himself forgetting things, things he couldn't get out of his head since the day his parents died. He grew in age for the graying men and fell back for the teenaged rebels. He never had to mark the lines to keep track of his character intentions and objectives. It was something that came straight from his nature, and he couldn't not do it if he tried. He didn't understand how it was hard for the others at the theater or why the director had to tell them to feel. Didn't they have this same ability as he did? Weren't they paying attention to all the things they could draw to the surface from themselves?

The next day he went back to Grigor's theater and showed him what he learned. What puzzled him was the troubled expression on Grigor's face as he spewed a hundred other people at him.

He kept waiting for the smile, diving into new monologues until the old man showed some appreciation for what he had done. None came, and he finally scowled and asked, "What gives?"

The old Grigor shook his head. "Almost none of these is age appropriate. Let me give you one of my books."

His anger gave way to confusion. "Age appropriate?"

Grigor sighed. "My boy, you assume all of the troubles of those who are much, much older than you. You absorb their pains, then say their words. It is wasted effort, though, when today you will not be cast as a sixty-year-old man."

A smile crept along his small young lips.

Later, Grigor had elaborated on that answer. He spoke of the power of empathy. He said that it's nearly impossible to understand and internalize the mindset of an age he has not yet reached. Recalling younger years is easier, since he has been there. He smiled, then, accentuating all of the wrinkles on his face, and said that he could tell that his young protégé would not have appreciated this answer as an impatient boy. When the then-teenager laughed at this, the elder raised his finger in the air and said, "See? You remember what it was to be that age."

That was the last time he tried to act older. Later he'd use the same retort to adults who said "Damn kids" when they caught him graffitiing walls or playing a prank. It made things easier. It made him happier.

And remembering these, he was smiling the moment after being told that Grigor died.

It didn't really hit him for a long time, definitely not for all the times Grigor never came to rehearsal after that. Because if he isn't here, the teenager always thought, he's surely somewhere else. But in that time, he learned to forget about himself. He forgot all about the exercises Grigor gave him to get out of character, to stop acting. For a while before it had looked like he could have lived as a person, not a house of characters. But with Grigor gone, he went haywire. He forgot about the smaller characters and started leaping ahead to the bigger ones again. By the time he saw it happening, it was too late. They had sunk in too far.

Eventually he made time to visit Grigor's grave more because he felt like he should than he actually wanted to. And even then he wasn't sad like he expected himself to be. It was just a name on a slab of stone. He could dig the name and the character up from the dirt, rescuing them from obscurity. Then the old man wasn't really dead, not if he lived in somebody else as a character.

From that moment on the grave felt like home. It should have been strange to him, but it wasn't. When he thought of Grigor he thought of a fatter, grayer man with skin wrinkled by smiles. It could still be him in half a lifetime.

It would be a few more years before Grigor returned to this idea. Soon afterward he had turned eighteen and discovered that he couldn't live on just what the theater paid him. That brought another group of concerns he had had to deal with before he could think about anything extra. But he never forgot. Once he was sure he didn't have to live on the streets, he got the paperwork and legally changed his name.

So little has changed since then. Even today, here, in the same graveyard, Grigor recognizes the more cynical side of him as Hornbeck.

His eyes refocus on the grave, and he reads the line below Grigor's name:

"_Let the tears which fell… be sacred."_

Charles Dickens. _Oliver Twist_.

Grigor remembers the full quote from a former production of _Oliver! _in which he played Bill Sikes. His internal character council had railed against him for accepting the part. As a result he'd thought himself woefully miscast for the role and read the book, memorizing all of the passages detailing his character, to compensate. But somewhere between pages he had grudgingly fallen in love, and he found he couldn't coldly cut out the other sections as if they didn't matter. Maybe Dickens had him under his thumb, or maybe Grigor had Dickens under _his_ thumb. Either way it felt like a betrayal, to Dickens, to his namesake, to all of the other identities he'd assumed over the course of his career, to everything that had gotten him out of that cardboard box next to a dumpster on the corner of Ridge and Clearfield. Grigor knows that he's one of those lost passages, that he only got out because somebody once paid attention to him. So he read with all his might.

Standing there, he finishes Grigor's epitaph. In it, the orphans had cried and embraced one another, but somehow the pain had left them.

He always likes to think that the embrace made them whole, a conglomerate of struggling traits and temptations that made a person. Literally it wasn't applicable anyway, since he never got on well with his foster siblings. There was always an unspoken competition between them, seeing who could be the best kid and who would stay the longest. No, the orphans here are those in his head, the thousand souls, screaming, each fighting to break free and take over his body. The thousand souls who shivered and all laid down with him on the frosted ground, who cried with him when at fourteen he was carried by the scruff of his neck to a padded theater seat where he slept for two days straight, who cried again when he turned eighteen. They, too, vie for approval. Some shove down others. But they work together, coordinating their voices to speak at the same time in a mighty roar. It gives him a headache, everything that exists inside his head.

Yet to be rid of it is to be launching himself into the gladiator ring naked and without a shield.

* * *

><p>Two years later Grigor has the name-changing papers. He's lying back in a chair in the box office on a slow day at <em>Jones Theater<em> and holding them close to his face, squinting at the fine print. He is about to give Grigor back because it's just been too long. His name is never going to be on a marquee. He's giving it back because he no longer deserves to hold it. He's not the man Grigor was, and now he knows he never will be.

Casting off the thousand souls within him was just as painful as he feared. For a full year he stopped acting and fell back on his second job of waiting tables. He went into withdrawals more times than he could count. For the first month, they were nonstop. It seemed like it never slowed down, the way his head swarmed with inky blackness from sheer effort of distancing himself every time he saw a movie or read a book.

Finally it did slow down. And then it took an even greater effort not to drink himself to death as was the tradition of out-of-work actors before him. The gaps didn't close by themselves, either. It was painful, Grigor admits, but it forced him to develop a personality of his own just to have something to talk about on job interviews or dates. He started small… favorite color, favorite fruit. Now he's up to favorite animal. Most show habits that imply fascinating character qualities. And it's hard to say which one is the best when he really appreciates them all.

But keeping hold of any personality whatsoever is impossible when Grigor is working the box office like he is today. At best it's lots of free time between visits, during which he almost creates characters to keep himself company. But he doesn't. He promised himself.

"Hi."

Grigor puts down the papers and sits up.

Some guy had crept in when he wasn't paying attention. He's got dark hair, mid-thirties, and looks down and scratches his ear as he talks again. "I wanna purchase a ticket for tomorrow's performance of _Bacchae_," he mumbles.

Probably an accountant.

"Matinee or evening?" Grigor asks, shuffling around for the seat plans.

"Evening."

At worst, box office duty is tedious. Saying the same things to the same people over and over again. It kills anything that made one person different from one another.

It takes Grigor a second to realize that the customer is still talking to him. When he does, he realizes that what he heard was a series of vocalizations that didn't resemble words. "What?" he asks.

"Are you in the show?" the accountant repeats.

Grigor adjusts the pencil behind his ear. "Yes."

"Who do you play?"

"Dionysus."

"The main character?" he asks in surprise. "What are you doing in the box office?"

"I volunteered," Grigor says as he tears the ticket off the printer. "Here."

The accountant jerks his head up and down in a short, tight movement. "Looking forward to seeing the show."

"Hope you enjoy it," Grigor replies, back to the script for these transactions. His eyes trail after the accountant. He had lied about volunteering. It's simpler to lie. Better to let people continue thinking that acting is glamorous. That being the lead actor in a small theater gives a person some kind of clout so he's excused from doing more than one job like everybody else.

More time passes. Grigor settles back into his chair.

Once he gives Grigor's name up, he's giving up on his greatest dream. He's giving up on everybody who ever helped him. On the idea that there was any purpose to him reaching adulthood.

All his life Grigor has been concerned with survival. Whether on the streets, in foster homes, in tiny, non-heated or air-conditioned apartments, or the theater, he's always done what it takes to make it. Always _wanted_ to do what it takes to make it.

Now it doesn't seem so important.

His cell phone rings. Grigor doesn't want to move to pick it up even though it's just lying on his chest. But it might be the director. With a sigh he sits up and lets the phone fall to his lap, then inches his arm toward it and slides it open.

It's Niobe. He still knows that voice. He never forgets a voice, just in case he wants to borrow it.

"I never thanked you," she says in a low voice. "I never thanked you for what you did for me."

It's the plea deal she's talking about. Before she would never talk about it, never admit it.

"I know your life," she continues, "and I know mine. I know your dream. I know you're having trouble."

"What are you talking about Niobe?" Grigor asks finally. Only a few seconds into the conversation, and she's already struck a nerve. She doesn't know the first thing about his life other than what he told her the few times he helped her with reproductions in the workshop. And he didn't tell her anything more than he told anyone else, which wasn't much.

Well, not that much.

There is a shudder in her sigh. "Please, let me finish," she says.

Grigor stays silent.

"I know who I am. I am timid. My career is over, my _life_ is over, and yet you saved it."

"Niobe, I didn't do anything. You deserve a second chance."

"Grigor, _please_," she says.

He stops because there is something else in her voice that isn't a plea. It's a…

Command?

"I know what you've wanted for all these years. And I want you to have it."

Grigor wonders where she's getting at with this. It's too late for follow-up phone calls, friendly check-ups. And Niobe is the last person to reach out to anybody.

"I need to thank you, actually," she laughs a little. "Not just for that, but for the past few weeks. The courage you've given me. I wouldn't have been able to…"

He doesn't speak to egg her on. He doesn't dare. There's something here, some vestige of the feeling he got when he pretended that the Plutus list was comprised of angel investors. A glimmer of real had eaten away at him, then, until he was shouting about how his dream was ruined and he believed it was so.

Forgetting that his dream was ruined years ago.

There's something in her voice, in what she's saying, that mirrors what the redheaded girl was saying that day when she poked around too much, that makes him stop. He feels fear. The gravity of change.

"I talked to my friend, Grigor."

He feels it, something, although he doesn't yet know what it is.

"I talked to her. I let her see me. I let her see what I've been hiding from everybody else, the wreck of my life. I didn't say that she caused it by stealing what I gave. I didn't tell her that she destroyed me. I just let her see it for herself. And I know…" she trailed off again.

He knows he needs to give her time, but it's harder and harder to keep quiet.

"Thank you for making me brave. Thank you for giving back to my life some meaning. Thank you for helping me get over the loss of my career because I am over it now. I know that out of all of this could come something more beautiful than I could sculpt."

Tears start at his eyes. He closes them, wondering what's possessing him to lose it.

"She's going to help with your theater, Grigor. I would not leave until she promised me."

He doesn't feel shame for crying. He is alone in the box office, and Niobe is a close friend. In a matter of minutes, she is as close a friend as he's had since Grigor passed on.

"That means she's going to be very hands-off," Niobe continues. "She's content to throw as much money at you as she can without actually coming out and helping. She's happy to throw as much money at you as it takes to shut me up about the art I let her claim credit for. I would have threatened her if I needed to, and I think that she saw that, because I didn't need to."

"Niobe," Grigor says hoarsely, "I don't know what to say."

For a long time Niobe doesn't speak. Then she begins, so quietly at first Grigor doesn't think he hears correctly. "Forgive me for being silent for so long."

He can't speak.

"Promise me you will live happily. Promise me that two lives and careers won't be ruined by what happened at the museum."

"Niobe…" he starts to say with nothing past it. He is relieved when she cuts him off.

"You care just as much about acting as I do about art. I didn't understand how anyone could care for acting until I watched you. I didn't appreciate it myself until you helped me." She pauses, speaking more quietly and thoughtfully afterward. "When you first gave my life back to me, I was angry. I thought I had nothing to live for. For a long time I thought that. When I thought of everything that came of it… but… your theater, Grigor. I was thinking about it a few months ago. Most of that time I needed to summon up the courage, but I did. I knew what it would do for you. You've made me move past the wreckage of my career. You've pushed me past my fear. I thought that nothing good could come from this, and you showed me I was wrong. You gave me something to fight for, and you allowed me to win."

"Niobe," he tries again, in vain.

"These are things I can't repay you for, except to give you a livelihood where I can give you one. Maybe, in a way, I can give your life back to you like you did for me." She sighs. "My friend will give a lot of money. You might not need other investors. I had her on the run, Grigor. She's eager to do just about anything for it. If you do need more, she'll go out and find more. She has friends."

There is a click on the line. It takes a few seconds to register with Grigor that she has hung up. Swiping at his cheeks, he peers out to the lobby and nearly jolts with surprise at its tidiness. It's like a tornado, the magnitude of this news, sending everything into a mess, giving him the feeling that his life has been both created and destroyed.

Sinking down below the window he continues to cry, but it's different now. Now he cries because he wants to, _needs_ to have her name, her character, her quiet strength, her radiance to delve into, but he doesn't know how. Not when she's a woman and all of his dead characters are men. He can't be a Niobe without being a drag queen, or undergoing a sex change, but his masculine features would always be a parody of her gentle femininity when it wasn't a parody at all, when _she made him_. Some of his thousand souls had been women, the souls who motivated and shaped his characters without ever showing themselves. But though Niobe would be content to stay below the surface, shy as she is, he knows she doesn't deserve that.

He doesn't know how to pay her back without the honor of her name, and he despairs. He feels, as put in a line from a Dylan Thomas poem he read when he was studying the role of Huw in _How Green Was My Valley_, "green and _dying_."

* * *

><p>Building a cast is a process. Grigor never really cared much for Xenia, but he feels for her the first time he tries directing. A friend of his, Evan, wrote the script, so at least he didn't have to do that, too, although there are so many cheesy lines that ring false that he wishes he did.<p>

Just a few years of it, and Grigor is sick of being himself. He could assume so many different characters to prove that Evan wasn't writing people. He was just writing words. But Grigor is trapped into the conventional lifestyle of one character. And Grigor could hardly consider himself a character.

This is just another step toward the theater. He's building his resume, branching out. He knows he's getting there. Once he networks, gets to know people, rounds up a group of cast and crew, gets a few productions under his belt…

The next contender comes out. She's young and tiny, with a tangle of dark hair engulfing her figure and nearly covering her face. Possible character actor. "I'm Maia Bick." She hands Grigor her resume without smiling or saying anything else.

It's handwritten. Grigor smiles. Her writing is so legible and uniform that it might have been typed. The spaces are perfect.

Most of the supporting characters are male, and the one who's a female is supposed to be in her forties.

She's here for Phoebe, the female lead. He can feel it.

Phoebe is the hopeless simpering female ingenue, one of many tropes in the play. Next time, Grigor will hire a professional writer. For sure.

"I didn't bring a monologue," Maia says. Her hand taps her knee, and she looks down at her shoe. Her lips barely move. It's almost like she's trying to talk out of the corner of her mouth. "Evan gave me a copy of the script. I'd like to read Phoebe's monologue on page 47."

Grigor's eyebrows rise. Usually people don't read from the script until callbacks. He pulls his copy of the script from the pile on the armrest of the chair next to his. "Uh, okay."

This response terrifies her. Her shoulders slump forward and she swallows and nods, taking a deep breath.

"Just start whenever you're ready," Grigor says, feeling badly for being less than encouraging. It's one of the bigger monologues, too, with a dynamic emotional turnaround, which isn't exactly helping her case.

"Yeah. Um." She clears her throat.

In the moment before she begins, Grigor looks down at the resumé and headshot she handed him. The headshot doesn't look any different from the girl in front of him, so he moves on to the resume.

Again, his eyebrows rise. Princeton dropout.

Major: biology.

Most recent GPA: 3.7.

Dropout, but not a flunkout.

There are three credits on the resumé, and two are for staged readings. One is for a name part. Only one is a Princeton production—the others are local theaters—and that was for a bit part.

When she starts to speak, she catches him off guard. He flips around in the script until he reaches the page she's at. Then he looks up at her and notices that both her hands are free and trembling.

She has it memorized.

At first glance, there's nothing special about her. Her stage presence is nearly zero, and she doesn't project any more than she did from when she was talking just a moment ago.

"Go back to school!" his mind screams. "At least you've got that going for you!"

But there are other traps, he knows. An old colleague of his with a Master's degree in theater died of cirrhosis. Had turned to drinking when he wasn't able to get a job, which was always.

And as he forces his thoughts to shut off in order to actually listen to her, Grigor notes that something is off about her. There are more wrinkles in her face, and there's an exhausted hunch to her posture. She had come in that way, but that wasn't the way a nineteen-year-old girl looked and walked.

Then he sees it.

Intent.

She's someone. Someone specific. Maybe even some version of the two-dimensional character Evan wrote in his stupid script.

But she isn't Maia.

Maia might not even be real.

Raising his fingers to his chin, Grigor sits forward and watches.

Watches, transfixed, as two tears spill from her left eye. Then one from her right.

She's nailing this monologue, and she isn't even raising her voice.

Then she collapses suddenly to the floor.

He shifts nervously around in his seat. Woman down. Does this mean he has to call for an ambulance?

She stirs, though, and he sighs in relief. Although, to be honest, he's kind of a little bit angry about it. Scaring him like that.

She finishes the monologue twitching, mumbling, then lifting her head to speak the last line. Then another shriek before her head drops again.

A shiver runs down his spine.

That's Phoebe.

Maybe it's not the Phoebe Evan wants, but it's Phoebe.

Grigor's train of thought stops when she rises. She doesn't rid herself of the wrinkle in her face or the hunch, but there's a sudden glow to her eyes that's younger, eager. "Was I perfect?" she asks. Then shakes her head. "I mean… uh… thanks."

"Thank you," Grigor says mechanically as she practically runs off stage.

She's got potential, he admits. But this is bad for her. Grigor has heard of actors killing themselves after going out on stage and playing the same tortured characters every night, living the nightmares over and over again and feeling the tears corrode their insides.

She acts because she needs to. He recognizes it. She didn't leave school for no reason, after all, and all of the acting credits on her resumé are really recent.

She's losing herself.

Suddenly Grigor is the parent with the diary, the desire for a particular child, and she is the one with adolescent pain.

He is glad he is no longer swarmed by the thoughts and motives of others.

And someday she will be, too.

* * *

><p>It's been so long.<p>

Finally Grigor's theater is ready to open. Original play, small troupe. A different friend of his wrote the script for free.

It's two hours before the performance, and the doors will open in an hour. He figured on giving everybody extra time to gush over the theater's interior. He had racked up some serious bills in renovating the place, after all.

The theater is a little old theater. He likes characterizing it as a person, as Grigor a little old man, with a smile and the wrinkles. He feels a little guilty, but at least he isn't internalizing this character. It's not adding to the problem he used to have. Besides, old habits die hard.

It isn't perfect. He had to hire as few people as he could, and he himself is doubling as the director and producer. The costume designer is a temp, another friend helping out until he can get a "real" job. Also he wouldn't be able to mooch off his writer friend forever, and he'd have to cross that bridge when he came to it. The actors are all here on just a little pay, more out of a favor to him than for anything they can get out of it. They had logged a lot of rehearsal time, too, since everybody wants to exceed the audience's expectations. Otherwise they'd all be out of a job… especially the ones with the thinner resumes, which is most of them. One guy has a few summer stock credits to his name; Grigor milked that on the Playbill. Some are fresh out of high school. A couple are fresh out of college. Some are around college-graduate age but without the corresponding education. They're all young and idealistic except for one, who is old and idealistic.

Maia is at the forefront of them, the oldest member of his troupe. But her rehearsals are shorter, and after every role she attends a special one-on-one "reintegration" lesson with Grigor, with him teaching her to give all of her roles back to the script. She's showing process, and one day Grigor hopes that she'll go back to school. Out of loyalty, though, she probably won't, and she still likes acting even though she isn't allowed to hold onto her characters.

But the street is filling up quickly, and it's still early. A lot of people are showing up. He's confident that this will work.

That redheaded Drew girl is here. He smiles. When she sees him, she rushes over. Her embrace is long, and he senses she still feels guilt for having her friends call everybody on the Plutus list, even if she didn't actually ruin his dream. When she pulls back he considers asking her out again, more for nostalgia's sake than anything, before he notices the ring on her finger. He looks over and sees her date, who apparently is more than a date, crossing his arms and frowning just slightly, a healthy dose of jealousy on his face. Grigor laughs and detaches himself, going over to shake his hand.

Soon he is whisked away to talk with other guests and patrons.

Niobe is here, too. Today she wears her hair free and long, accentuating the smallness of her face and the wideness of her smile. Her strapless purple dress swirls around her ankles from an empire waist with tiny silver trim, the bodice a heliotrope satin and the skirt a lilac chiffon. He recognizes her as the goddess of the harvest. He recognizes her as the woman who stood up to Zeus, hurling her grief at his lightning bolts. She's a few years older than he is, although now he could swear she's younger.

She is the mother who didn't have a diary he could read and didn't want him for a mold to fit, who gave indiscriminately. She is the sister who never competed with him, never put the blame on him and got him kicked out of the house. She is the god he worships and, he thinks with a smile, now fears.

"Niobe! You made it!" he says cheerily. "I'm sorry to say that we're not offering a Greek tragedy today, or a Greek comedy, both of which might make you feel more at home."

"Less at home," she laughs wryly. "I'm sure this will be great."

His eyebrows rise. "More sure than me, apparently."

They fall into an easy silence.

Grigor's voice lowers in pitch. "I've got to tell you, just so you know, that there'll always be a place for you here. I know how you feel about your place in the art world." He wrings his hands in front of him and looks down at them. Being himself is so difficult, now that he feels his mentor slipping away. "But here you can build worlds and make all the art you want in it. All of the places in history, they're yours."

"You make it so hard to refuse," Niobe smiles. "The owner of _Simmons Theatre_ in London was a visiting professor of mine. She just hired me as a set designer."

"Wow." Grigor shakes his head and hugs her tightly, laughing. "_Wow_. Niobe, that's great."

"And so is this," she says, admiring the theater.

"Grigor's name is on the marquee." He pulls back just enough to look it over. "Yours will be over the house doors."

"Really?"

"Yep. The Greek spelling, of course."

"Isn't that unusual?"

"So what?" Grigor grins. "Art is about novelty. No one can stop us from being trailblazers. Besides, your name has to go somewhere."

Niobe starts to laugh before realizing he isn't. Sheepishly she looks down. "They poisoned us, but we survived," she says quietly.

Grigor squeezes her arm. Maybe it's true for her. Thanos and Xenia had sniped down 999 of him. 999 of the souls that made him special to others and a powerhouse on the stage. He knew he was somewhere in there. Perhaps he always had known. But now he feels a warmth spreading through him as if he's regaining circulation for the first time in years. He is no longer the plain white of the script page. Color fills him in, as man.

999 souls, dead. And it would dishonor them to pretend they didn't matter. They had gotten him through the first twenty-six years of his life, gotten him to the point where he could deal with the rest on his own. What _his own_ is, he still barely knows. He had skipped the angsty Who am I? teenage years only to return to them much, much later. If he's lucky, he'll be able to catch up in time to face a mid-life crisis.

His acting days are pretty long past, so no new souls capture him enough for him to borrow. A few come close, in the firm voice of a finely-written script, in the glimmer of a moment when one of his actors completely loses himself to the character and he springs up from the director chair. The familiar beauty of it pours over him. He has to pinch himself hard and love the pain of being real.

The soul left is his. He's sure of it.

And there's someone else who helped him with that. He doesn't know why she listened when she was there for another purpose, but somehow he had convinced himself she cared enough for him to justify writing to her after being arrested.

Grigor turns to Niobe. "You know who else we should thank?"

Right away she understands. "Yes," she nods. "The Anaxandra."

Grigor blinks. "Who?"

"Nancy."

"Oh. Yeah. That's what I was going to say."

They turn and look for the titian-haired woman. She is nowhere to be found.

"Wasn't she planning on attending the performance?" Niobe asks him.

"Maybe she had to dash out."

"So soon before the doors open?"

"You know, I read something about her solving another case in Iceland just a few days after she left Greece." Grigor bites his lip in thought. "I remember wondering how she ever got sleep."

"You think she got called away?"

"It's my best guess." His eyes dart up to the marquee, reading Karakinos, and he now at last reclaims himself. Finally, Grigor has his name back. Finally, he can call himself… he smiles. He is not quite ready yet. For these final moments as Grigor he remembers. From the spirit of a man who put more money in the theater than he ever got back and was repaid with more happiness than he could have dreamed. Whose life was the paint of backdrops, the silk hems of costumes, the ink of story, the moving air of all the untouchables who had been born here, invincible, as alter egos, more to the actors than just characters.

Sensing the gravity of this moment for him, Niobe steps away and examines the architecture of this theater.

Grigor walks in the opposite direction to the stone on the corner, which is covered. He had a commemorative plate and text added. Apparently the workers forgot to take the cloth away when they were done. He kneels down and unveils the plaque, revealing the Dickens quote he had remembered in the graveyard all those years ago.

"_Let the tears which fell, and the broken words which were excluded in the long close embrace between the orphans, be sacred. A father, sister, and mother, were gained, and lost, in that one moment. Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain."_

**AN: Niobe's probably my favorite character in LIE, but Grigor is easily the most fascinating. Actors are interesting and confounding and incredible. I actually have no idea what I was going for with the voice here-maybe the distance is to match his character, his confusion over who he is because of his inability to stop acting. This piece became a lot bigger than what I first intended for it, and Niobe was not going to make an appearance. Now that she has, though, I want to write another piece in which she and Grigor interact. I think that there's a pretty big gap between their almost antagonistic relationship in the game and the closer friendship they have here, so now I want to fill that gap.**

**Why is Nancy engaged here? No clue**. It's a time device**, and it felt right****. Also**, the audition scene and obsession with perfection is inspired a bit by _Black Swan_******. Excellent movie about the psychology of performance******.********************


End file.
